The Official Website of
C. E. Gatchalian

Publications

Falling In Time

One of the most controversial and uncompromising Canadian plays in recent memory, C. E. Gatchalian's Falling In Time is an epic exploration of armed conflict, masculinity, sexuality, love, and forgiveness. Set in Vancouver in 1994, the year of the death of North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung, the play criss-crosses two hemispheres and spans more than forty years. Through all this, four distinctly different lives intertwine. Steve is an aging, outrageous, bisexual Korean War vet who embodies the sadistic tendencies of Western imperialism that polite society has too often tried to sweep from view. Jamie is an aloof, repressed ESL teacher haunted by a troubled childhood. Chang Hyun is a young Korean student brimming with anti-Western sentiment and still reeling from a traumatic experience in the military. In the middle of it all is Eun Ha, a woman who lives through the Korean War and, against all odds, finds the will to survive. A brutally honest depiction of war, rape, racism and animal sexuality, Falling In Time asks the question "How do we let go?"

Crossing & Other Plays

“Brilliant.” “Disturbing.” “Unapologetically naked.” Just some of the adjectives critics have used to describe the work of C. E. Gatchalian. Collected in this volume are three of the plays that have put Gatchalian on the map as one of Canada’s most daring and distinctive young playwrights.

Crossing explores the tormented, sexually charged relationship between a mother and her teenage son, bound together by guilt and fear over a horrific incident that occurred ten years prior. Diamond is an elliptical, metatheatrical dissection of one woman’s intimate story. Ticks is the frantic, metronome-accompanied monologue of a self-appointed, disease-stricken messiah, eager to bring a plague upon the city.

Broken

New Bard Press (Edmonton)

December 2006

ISBN-10: 1847288669

ISBN-13: 978-1847288660

Like a shard of glass to the spine, Gatchalian's Broken is razor sharp, digging deep to scrape the nerve. Emotional dysfunction spreads like a plague through a namelessly familiar urban sprawl. In its wake, nothing survives unbroken: hearts, families, rhythms, dreams. At the epicentre of the maelstrom is a young man named Adrian, godlike and hurting, struggling to discern the sickness from the cure. New Bard Press is excited to publish this script as an artifact of Broken's world premiere at Vancouver's Firehall Arts Centre, March 2006.

tor/sion

Note: No more copies available from the publisher. To order, please contact the author
directly.

Motifs & Repetitions & Other Plays

The Writers' Collective (Cranston)

May 2003

ISBN-10: 1932133496

ISBN-13: 978-1932133493

A collection of one-act plays by one of North America's most promising young playwrights.The title play is a racy, comical, and ultimately shattering portrait of young love; Hands traces the disintegration of a tormented family; Claire is an absurdist, Sartrean meditation on the brutal power structures in relationships; and Star is a brief but bracing monologue about the nature of obsession. With his minimalist settings and spare, rhythmic dialogue, C.E. Gatchalian creates a dark, claustrophobic world where sex, love and obsession mix to form terrifying realities.